SynMax Vulcan Election Brief | November 4, 2026
Read this and you will be able to: size the 5 GW of not-yet-built capacity that voters moved against last night, see which 154.7 GW of state pipeline now sits under moratorium-backing governors, and know the one physical signal that tells you whether a megawatt is real before the next earnings call does. The project-by-project list behind that 5 GW lives on the Vulcan Friction Tracker, where subscribers can open each one.
If you develop, finance, supply power to, or trade around U.S. data center load, your pipeline assumptions aged a year in one night. Forty-one local ballot measures and a slate of governor races went to voters on November 3. Nearly every result that is in points one direction: against data centers.
That matters because the planned-operation dates you are modeling for 2028 were already optimistic. In Placing the Bust, we described a Dark Chip scenario: capacity promised to the market that never gets energized, pushing GPU rental rates up and forcing hardware out of sites that were counted on. Last night was the first election-scale signal that the scenario is in motion. The question is no longer whether the pipeline will shrink. It is which projects, where, and when, and whether you will know before your counterparties do.
Ballots change the odds. Dirt settles the bet.
The 41 local measures were not all moratoriums, which is the first place most coverage gets this wrong. Twenty-eight would restrict data centers (17 outright bans, 3 six-month moratoriums, plus voter-approval, zoning and review rules) and 13 would support them (rezonings and advisory votes). Every measure with results in went against data centers: the restrictions passed and the pro-development measures were defeated. Six are still pending: Ottawa, KS; Harwood, ND; Boulder City, NV; Oregon, OH; and Monroe and Sprigg townships in Adams County, OH.
We matched each voting jurisdiction by hand to the not-yet-operational projects inside or immediately adjacent to it. That is more than 5 GW of directly exposed capacity, and it is front-loaded: about 1.3 GW of it carries a 2028 planned operation date.
Figure 1. Direct data center capacity in November 3 ballot jurisdictions, by planned online year. Red: measure passed against data centers. Yellow: result pending.
The local measures are the sharp edge. The governor results are the weight behind it. Nine governors-elect who have backed a data center moratorium now oversee 154.7 GW of non-operational pipeline, led by Texas (110.1 GW), Georgia (31.9 GW), New Mexico (5.9 GW) and Oregon (2.8 GW). Governors in the regulate-or-conditional camp oversee another 125.0 GW. Fully supportive governors oversee just 15.6 GW.
Five of those seats flipped from Republican to Democrat and have been called: Georgia (Keisha Lance Bottoms), Iowa (Rob Sand), Nevada (Aaron Ford), Ohio (Amy Acton) and Texas (Gina Hinojosa).
Figure 2. Governor stance on data center moratoriums, by state.
Put the stance against the schedule and the shape is unmistakable. More than 30 GW of capacity with a 2028 online date now sits in moratorium-backing states, with another 28 GW in conditional states. The supportive-state bar for 2028 is under 4 GW.
Figure 3. Non-operational data center GW by planned online year and governor-elect stance.
The tempting conclusion is that 154.7 GW is now dead. It is not, and treating it that way is as costly as ignoring it. A governor's stance changes the probability and the timeline of a project; it does not pour or cancel a foundation. Some of that capacity will get built anyway. Some projects in supportive states will quietly stall for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.
A second trap: the public record disagrees with itself. Ballotpedia lists vote shares for Granville, OH and the four Wilmington, OH rezonings in the opposite direction from local reporting. We follow the Cincinnati Enquirer, which reports the Granville ban passed and all four Wilmington rezonings were rejected. If you are building a model on press results, you have already inherited at least one error.
The election tells you where the friction is. It cannot tell you what is actually happening on the ground. For that, only one thing is reliable: watching the site.
We built Vulcan for exactly this gap. Every week, Vulcan checks each individual data center and power generation site from satellite for the milestones that cannot be spun: land clearing, first structure, grid connection. A project whose developer says it is on track for 2028 but has no cleared ground in late 2026 is not on track, whatever the governor thinks of it.
As of this morning, Vulcan subscribers have:
Over the coming weeks, these site observations will resolve the question the ballots opened. Projects that keep clearing ground are real. Projects that go quiet are the first evictions of the scenario we wrote about.
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Not ready for a demo? Request a complimentary copy of Placing the Bust and read the scenario last night started to confirm.
You can size the 5 GW of capacity voters moved against on November 3, the 154.7 GW of state pipeline now sitting under moratorium-backing governors, and the 2028 cliff where those two overlap. And you know the one thing the election cannot tell you: whether the dirt is moving. That is the signal Vulcan was built to deliver, and it is the one we will be reporting on week by week from here.
Ballots change the odds. Dirt settles the bet.
A "direct" project is an IIR-listed project that is not yet operational and sits inside or immediately adjacent to a voting jurisdiction, matched by hand by name and location. Online year uses the IIR planned operation date. Ballot measure classifications follow Ballotpedia News; where Ballotpedia and local reporting conflict (Granville and Wilmington, OH), we follow the Cincinnati Enquirer. Governor stance categories: moratorium/restrictive, conditional/regulate, supportive, and no stated position. Six local measures remain pending at time of writing and are shown in yellow.
Voters Just Put 154 GW of Data Center Pipeline in Doubt. Here Is How You Find Out What Still Gets Built.
Voters Just Put 154 GW of Data Center Pipeline in Doubt. Here Is How You Find Out What Still Gets Built.